She shines with bows in her hair
by planet p
Summary: Violet is a cleaner at the Center. She doesn’t have any friends, until she meets a Sweeper.


**She shines with bows in her hair; he will protect her** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

* * *

Violet was a small woman with eyes that could have easily been dark grey, or black, or even, as her name suggested, violet. No, she was a young woman. She was small, not only of height, but of bones, always small boned.

She liked to wear bows in her dark hair; some days her hair was black, and others it was dark brown, so some days her bows were purple, and others they were pink, or, if she were feeling sad, then they'd be blue, dark blue, or navy blue, or peacock blue, or sky blue, or powder blue.

At night, she'd sit in bed alone and read Dr. Seuss. She liked Dr. Seuss, and when she read Dr. Seuss, she didn't have to think how much her skinny knees sometimes hurt. She was a cleaner, see, and some days she spent a lot of time on her knees, scrubbing at a stubborn stain or chiselling away at something mucky and hardened, or wiping up a spill, or some other such task which required placing her weight onto her knees.

After she'd put the evening's picture book away, she would lie down to sleep, and close her eyes and picture herself as the mother of a happy family in a house in the countryside – she'd always name her first son Jarod – and, amongst that happy family, if she squinted her eyes against the sun, she could make out a young man, and she always liked to imagine him the most, and what a wonderful smile he would have when he turned it on her. It would be so wonderful that she couldn't help but smile.

But it was just a dream.

She was a cleaner for a place known as the Center, and everybody who knew something knew that there was something wrong with that place. But still, she was only a cleaner, and the lowly staff weren't to know anything, so they didn't know anything. It was just a job, and they could go home at the end of the day with a pay packet, so they didn't like to think too hard on it.

But Violet thought on it. She thought on it a great deal. Jarod had once lived in that place, as much as anyone could be said to 'live' whilst they were slowly dying, day by day. Jarod had escaped once, and now the Center wanted to bring him back and lock him back up so he'd never escape again.

But Violet couldn't allow that, because Jarod had saved her life. It had been Jarod who'd given her her name. He was as much her father as she could remember having one, and though they'd not kept in contact, she'd sought out his secrets with a fervour as though they were her own, and, as he was her father in her world, they belonged to her as much as they belonged to him; she'd inherited them when she'd taken her name.

So, she had come to the Center, so that, when the time came, she would be in a position to act to help Jarod, to help her 'father.'

* * *

Willie had noticed the girl, of course. He'd always thought that she couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, so what was she doing cleaning for a living, what was she doing out of school? But that wasn't really his concern, so he'd kept it from his mind, most times.

Not all kids in America got a fair deal, and it was as simple as that. It was as it was in any society, money talked. And he'd got himself a good job, so maybe, he thought, one day the girl would get herself a good job, too. Or maybe she'd stay on the poverty line, because she was too good of a girl to submit to hurting others for her own good and profit.

He liked to think that she was a good girl, and sometimes he hoped not to see her again the next day, hoped she'd have come to her senses, or scraped up enough savings to start a small college fund, or inherited enough money from a great aunt or uncle who'd recently died and packed up her things and taken off for university.

But it was not like that. She was always back again the next day, just as he was.

There should have been somebody to look after her, he often thought. A nice, rich boy, but no the sort who'd hit her around, a boy with class and discipline who understood how to treat a lady, and that a lady would treat a man right if he treated her right in return.

He could tell that the girl was not a mean one; she would treat the boy nice if he treated her nice, and he hoped for her that she would find this boy, someday. And that it would be soon. (As much as he liked to see somebody around who was not cut of the company's efficiently ruthless mould, he'd have liked to see the girl happy more; it pained him to see children unhappy, and to him she was still a child.)

He supposed, that fact itself indicated as to his character. After so many years, he'd been sloppy, and he'd not managed to harden himself as he had promised himself he would. He had promised himself, if it could still affect him, then he would give up on it; but he had broken that promise time and again.

He did not want to live in poverty or destitute, and, it seemed, he was willing to suffer the greater misery for it; the despair of his morality. He knew, that for that, he was a bad man, and bad men had no cause thinking on good girls, so he tried to tell himself that he wouldn't think on the girl anymore.

But he always did.

* * *

He wasn't pretty, Violet decided, but there was something elegant about the gleam of his skin, something that reminded her of the soulless black eyes of teddy bears and rag dolls, the old sort which didn't feature colourful irises in a variety of blue, green, yellow, red or brown. She liked his skin, even with its blemishes, she decided.

He'd taken a seat across the table from her in the dining hall for lunch, mostly, she thought, because he didn't much feel the particular urge to sit beside all of those jostling, gossiping nurses, yapping away like small, mangy dogs.

It was the jostling that would have done it, she thought.

It had been the same for her.

An overabundance of excitement, and too much cheer, was a somewhat frightening and foreign prospect to her. It always left her feeling as though, were she to attempt an integration, a mimicry, she'd only end it by looking like she'd right gone off her head and gone nutters. (They'd all stare at her, then, and wonder what was the matter, and what was her problem.)

So she kept to herself and recited Dr. Seuss soundlessly to herself when she was bored, or the narrator's lines of the documentary she'd caught on the television last night. (She absolutely adored documentaries about nature, or animals of any sort; she was entirely in love with them, and similarly in love with David Attenborough. He was her favourite television personality ever.)

He hadn't noticed her attention, she thought, and if he had, she entirely supposed that he'd have gone ahead and joined those gaggling nurses, right out of fright, but he hadn't, and she couldn't stop looking. She had to figure out what it was exactly he did, it was hurting her not to know. (It was so awful when she got like that, because she'd not be able to sleep for days, wondering, but she'd noticed him a lot of the past few weeks, and she'd just wondered what it was _he_ did.)

Her heavy sigh was stifled by those around her, carrying on conversations into their cell phones, or between one another, and she was secretly glad. Her clothes sighed when she leaned forward, but even the sound of that was muffled. (It made her want to giggle.) She was so stealthy amongst these loud, bright people.

She reached out her hand as far as it would go, and her arm was so straight she thought it looked like a snake that had been attacked by something awful and playful, like a cat, and the muscles in it hurt, even, as though they had. (She'd been scrubbing, and it'd been the scrubbing that's done it, she knew.)

She could feel the smile on her face, and she hoped it was friendly, and big enough to be noticed, and cleared her throat. "Excuse me, but I wondered what you do," she told the man in a slightly raised voice – she came to the decision that her voice sounded funny that way, even to her – "I'm a cleaner."

* * *

When he noticed that the small girl was talking to him, Willie instantly felt as though he should leap up out of his chair, leaving his lunch behind, and run out of the dining hall. He could not talk to the perfect girl; he had nothing to say to her that would not damage her if she knew.

Her mouth was smiling, and her eyes were, too, and he felt tears prickling his eyes. Would it be okay to excuse himself without saying anything?

But this would disappoint and anger the girl, and she'd think she had done something wrong.

He could not do that.

She had told him something about herself, and now he was obliged, by politeness, to reply.

"I am a Sweeper," he told her. He could not think of a lie quickly enough, and, he told himself, a lie was more painful than the truth when the one to whom the truth was being told was not complicit. (She would not know that by admitting that he was a Sweeper that he was a bad person; she would not know what he did, and that some of the things he did were bad things.)

Her smile confirmed what he had suspected, that she did not know of the Sweepers, and he managed a smile back. Not a large smile, but a smile large enough to be noticed by the girl, sitting directly across from him at the table, as one.

He admonished himself for not noticing that she was at the table also before taking a seat at it, but he'd been distracted by the other Sweepers whom he'd been trying to avoid, so he'd not noticed. (He'd slipped up.)

The small girl's smile was painless and radiant, and he thought that he could almost feel it upon his skin, and upon his lips. It made him want to smile, too, though he was not a good smiler.

"I'm Violet. Milton," the small girl told him.

He wanted to place a hand over her mouth, in case any others who were not of honourable intention were to be found listening, but, as he was sitting across an entire table's width, he could do no such thing, and, he decided, he did not want to startle the girl and make her smile go away.

"I am Willie," he responded. (He thought, as he did, how long it had been since he'd spoken his own name. Too long, it had been, he decided. It was not a bad name.)

It meant _guardian_.

In this place, he would be Violet Milton's guardian, he decided.

Violet's smile shone like the sun.


End file.
